The Justice Department released a memo this week that quietly calls into question decades of civil rights protections for Americans with disabilities and stirred fear and anger among advocates and families.

The memo, an opinion from the Office of Legal Counsel, argues that states do not have to provide in-home or community-based care to people with disabilities who need support. These services allow many disabled Americans to continue to live, learn and work at home or in their own communities, among family and friends.

“It is now the position of the United States government that people with disabilities don’t have a right to be part of their communities,” says Alison Barkoff, a health law and policy professor at George Washington University who led disability law and policy efforts during both the Obama and Biden administrations. “I can’t overstate how significant this change in position is.“

Without the federal government requiring that states provide these services – to help disabled people integrate into their communities – advocates and legal experts warn that cash-strapped states could cut them and return to what was once common practice: de facto segregation of Americans with disabilities in nursing homes and large institutions.

Pushback from the disability community was swift.

“As America prepares to celebrate 250 years of independence, [this memo] threatens to drag our nation back to a dark and shameful era of ignorance and cruelty,” said the American Association of People with Disabilities. “This interpretation will open the doors for states to revert to warehousing people with disabilities out of sight and out of mind in institutions.”

“This opinion is a direct threat to decades of progress toward community living for people with disabilities,” said Shira Wakschlag of The Arc of the United States, a nonprofit disability advocacy group. “People with disabilities shouldn’t be forced into institutions because a state refuses to provide services in the community.”

The Justice Department did not respond to an NPR request that it explain its position as well as why it is changing course after decades of legal and bipartisan support for community services.

What the law says

This new memo calls into question what legal experts say has been settled law for decades.

Kim was, in her words, “starving for that fatherly love.”

She became an intern for Baer and always looked forward to being held in his arms for extended periods of time. She eventually asked him if there was anything she could do to help ease the fear that she believed was still holding her back.

There was, Baer told her. At his direction, she took off her top and bra, Kim said, and he held her but didn’t touch her breasts or privates.

“It felt very parental, and it felt very special,” she said.

In hindsight, Kim said, she cherished the experience for another reason.

“I was getting this special attention from him,” she said. “I was pretty desperate for that in my life.”

She now sees it as classic grooming behavior.

It happened one other time, Kim said, and she eventually asked him if there was anything else she could do to experience a “bigger shift.”

Baer brought her to the pool house and instructed her to remove her clothes piece by piece, Kim said. He lay in bed with her, rubbed her back and held her breasts, according to Kim.

“There was no talking me into it — I just did it,” Kim said. “In hindsight, I realized I didn’t feel free to say no to any of it. I had the belief that if I did say no, he would write me off.”

When Kim got the call from her daughter Penelope, she said it jolted her out of what she now describes as a cult mindset.

She spoke to other women in the community and said she heard more stories involving naked holding.

One of those women was Inge Jechart. A mother of two with a doctorate in physics, Inge had been an active Real Love member since a friend recommended Baer around 2005.

“At that time, I was lost and lonely,” she said, describing struggling under the weight of a faltering marriage and a strained relationship with her sons. “I learned how to become a better person and more loving and understanding.”

The first time Baer held her in his lap, Inge was overcome with emotion.

“I just cried,” Inge recalled. “It was such a relief to feel safe and loved. What else do we want in life?”

Following that experience, Inge said, she booked every retreat at his house that she could. And it was there, in 2017, that she said she twice got naked with Baer at his direction.

“We hold our own children when they’re naked to make them feel safe,” Inge said. “For me, that’s what we were doing.”

“And here’s the thing,” she added. “It made a huge difference for me.”

But Inge said Baer fondled her breasts the second time, and that didn’t feel right at all.

“I said, ‘Hey, as a 4-year-old, I wouldn’t have breasts,’” she recalled. “And he stopped.”

Inge said Baer told her he had done it with only one other woman before, and he added in a stern voice: “I don’t talk about this with anyone else.”

“I got the message,” Inge said. “Our community was important to me, and I didn’t want it to blow up, so I kept silent.”

But she said she never considered that he might be engaging in naked holding with younger, more impressionable women like Veena and Penelope.

Kim, Penelope’s mother, said the same.

“It had never crossed my mind that he would ever do this with my daughter,” Kim said. “I was completely blind to that possibility.”

The backlash

In February 2019, Kim sat down at her computer and began to type an email to Baer.

“Greg what you have done with my daughter…is wrong, hurtful, traumatic and goes against so many gospel principles,” read the email, which was reviewed by NBC News.

“Holding people without clothes on needs to stop, what you are doing is wrong,” it added. “Touching my daughter between her legs when she was naked was wrong — there is no justification for it.”

“I know of 4 women personally who have undressed completely with you, and I don’t know hardly anyone that you spend time with so I conjecture that there are many more,” Kim wrote near the end. “I beg of you…put a stop to this horribly damaging behavior.”

Baer was defiant in his response.

Kim’s daughter was “claiming events that never happened,” he wrote. “And she is supplying lots of details that never happened. And now she is sharing these details with as many people as she can find.”

Kim’s email wasn’t the only scathing message Baer received during this period.

“I am writing to perhaps appeal to your consciences and any integrity you may still have left,” wrote a woman from the U.K. in an email viewed by NBC News. “Shut Real Love down now before it’s too late.”

“Greg you have had sexual dealings with way more women than we initially thought,” the woman added. “That’s not including the naked holding.”

Baer replied with another strong denial.

“Nothing, absolutely nothing, like this is occurring, and people are healing all over the place,” he wrote to the British woman.

After receiving an email from NBC News, the woman declined to be interviewed, citing the lasting emotional toll.

“It’s honestly an incredibly traumatic part of my life, and one I don’t want to revisit,” she wrote. “It’s been 8 years and I haven’t moved on.”

The aftermath

Veena, Penelope and her mother said they all reached out to the police in Baer’s hometown of Rome but were told there was not enough evidence to pursue a sexual abuse case.

The Rome Police Department confirmed to NBC News that it conducted an investigation but said no charges were brought due to “insufficient probable cause.”

The women said they had also reported Baer to their local Mormon churches.

A spokesman for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, widely known as the Mormon church, said it “initiated ecclesiastical proceedings involving this individual beginning in February 2020.”

The process could lead to a member’s excommunication, but the spokesman said he was not authorized to comment on the outcome of the proceedings.

Veena and Penelope filed lawsuits against Baer in Georgia’s Floyd County Superior Court in April 2019. They were settled five months later for $12,000 each. (The attorney who represented Baer, Robert Smalley, declined to comment.)

By then, Veena was adapting to life outside of Real Love. She had already separated from her husband and left the church. While raising her three children, she went back to college. A career in physics no longer interested her. She earned a degree in psychology from Columbia University.

“To help me understand what on earth just happened,” Veena said.

A few years ago, she decided to write what became a very different book than the one originally conceived about her experience in Real Love. She used pseudonyms for the group and for Baer himself, but the account, she said, was drawn from her recollections, emails and journal entries.

“The True Happiness Company” was published last year with the subtitle, “How a Girl Like Me Falls for a Cult Like That.”

Veena hoped that it would help her process what happened and serve as a cautionary tale for others.

“The physical violation is not what unravels me,” she says in the book. “It’s the loss of life experience, the mental and emotional violation of having my young adulthood orchestrated by someone with undue influence over me. It’s the friendships that disintegrated. The career paths unexplored. The opinions he replaced with his own.”

“The changes feel almost imperceptible as they happen,” she added later in the book, “and then suddenly appear extreme in retrospect.”

If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 or go to 988lifeline.org to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, or visit SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources.